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The Date

It wasn’t until I read Dan Drezner’s note on the date – 9/11 – that I realized I was starting my personal blog on the eighth anniversary of 11 September 2001. Completely unintentional. Drezner offers a couple of good points on threat inflation and resilience. Me? The personal referent for this was that 11 September 2001 coincided with my first day of teaching, for an undergraduate course on non-Western history. I had three early morning classes in a row, 25 students each. Students in the first session were muttering about the news, although nothing was clear at that point. By the time the second session started, people were better informed, but I was still completely clueless. When a couple of them related what they’d heard, I cancelled the lecture, then went back to my apartment and stayed glued to the tube for the next 24 hours.